Commercial establishments such as stores, restaurants, schools, hospitals and the like have a strong incentive to maintain clean, attractive floors, and considerable time and effort are expended toward that end. Ceramic or plastic tile floors are typical in such places, and a regular schedule of maintenance is used to keep them gleaming. Commonly a protective coating is applied to the tile to enhance its appearance, and when it becomes dingy it is stripped off by chemical means and a new coating is applied. This is expensive and time-consuming, so measures are taken to prolong to the maximum the time between recoatings.
A schedule of floor maintenance which is often followed consists of scrubbing daily with cleaning solution and/or finish enhancers using an automatic scrubber, burnishing daily, applying mop-on restorer once a week, applying a coat of finish every fourth week, then stripping and re-coating every four to six months. Two machines are required; a scrubber and a burnisher. The scrubber is complicated to operate, requiring training for chemical mixes. This is difficult when employee turnover is high. Scrubbers are also labor intensive, usually requiring one person to operate the machine and another to go behind with a mop and bucket to pick up water spills.
A substantial decrease in labor and training and an increase in the time between re-coatings can be obtained if the floor is cleaned as needed, which may be daily, using a small amount of liquid cleaner in a machine equipped with a suitable cleaning pad, after which the cleaning pad is replaced with a buffing pad and the floor is dry buffed. The cleaner may incorporate a percentage of thinned down floor finisher, which helps maintain the original finish. Then if the heavy traffic areas are occasionally touched up with a finish restorer, the time between re-coatings may often be extended to as much as a year.
The periodic cleaning, which often must be done on a daily basis, has posed problems. The cleaning solutions must be dispensed evenly, but at a very low rate, on the order of one gallon per 20,000 to 40,000 square feet of floor as an example, depending on the particular cleaner used, the condition of the floor, etc. Available equipment has not been entirely satisfactory in accomplishing this. There are basically three types of dispensers used in the industry today:
Manual sprayer--a hand pump and a bottle. Each time that cleaner is needed the operator must manually pump the cleaning solution out of the bottle.
Pressurized sprayer--a hand pump which pressurizes a bottle which holds the cleaning solution. Some type of valve is required to release the cleaning solution out of the bottle when needed.
Electric pump--an electric pump which pumps the cleaner out of a bottle when required. An on-off pump switch is commonly used for dispensing solution when needed.
All these dispensers require the operator to repeatedly operate a control and use judgment as to how long to use it to dispense the very small amount of cleaner required, and they dispense the cleaner in batches rather than continuously, which can affect performance adversely. Also, they all have the complexity of requiring some form of pump.